Black holes are a never ending source of scientific intrigue. They form when a star of appropriate mass, approximately 5 to 10 times the mass of our own star, reaches the end of its life and begins to fuse heavier and heavier elements. At this stage the outward pressure exerted by those fusion reactions cannot overcome the gravity from its mass and it slowly begins to collapse inwards. Eventually, in a calamitous event known as a supernova, it shrinks down to a point mass of infinite density and nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational bounds. Properties like that mean black holes do very strange things, most of which aren’t explained adequately by current models of our universe. One such thing is called the Information Paradox which has perplexed scientists for as long as the idea as black holes has been around.
The paradox stems from the interaction between general relativity (Einstein’s description of gravity as a property of spacetime) and quantum mechanics (the processes that affect atoms, photons and other particles). Their interaction suggests that physical information about anything that crosses the black hole’s event horizon could be destroyed. The problem with this is that it violates the generally held idea that if we have information about a system in one point in time we should be able to determine its state at any point in time. Put simply it means that, when you’re looking at a black hole, if something falls into it you have no way of determining when that happened because the information is destroyed.
However renown physicist Stephen Hawking, whose work on black holes is so notable that one feature of them (Hawking Radiation) is named after him, has theorized that the information might not be lost at all. Instead of the information being lost or stored within the black hole itself Hawking states that the information is stored as a super-translation (or a hologram, a 2D representation of 3D data) in the event horizon. Whilst for all practical purposes this means that the information is lost, I.E. you likely wouldn’t be able to reconstruct the system state prior to the particles crossing the event horizon, it would solve the paradox.
The idea might not be as radical as you first think as other researchers in the area, like Gerard t’Hooft (who was present at the conference where Hawking presented this idea), have been exploring similar ideas in the same vein. There’s definitely a lot of research to be done in this area, mostly to see whether or not the idea can be supported by current models or whether it warrants fundamental changes. If the idea holds up to further scrutiny then it’ll solve one of the most perplexing properties of black holes but there are still many more that await.
